Global High-Tech Innovation

September 09, 2009

When the first version of the Innovate With Influence book made the rounds within my company, one of the more oft-discussed aspects was my characterization of the role that managers play in regards to product innovation. My first draft asserted that an intrapreneur should own (and drive) the "cradle-to-grave" delivery of an idea into a product. My assumption was that this person was an individual contributor as opposed to a manager.

An intrapreneur maps customer requirements for the idea onto an architecture, drives a design (making compromises along the way), and collaborates with a whole host of co-workers, including members of quality test, documentation, service, pre-sales, etc. Part of this process also requires validation of the implementation as part of an alpha or beta release with customers.

My assertion is that a manager (someone who has direct reports) should not play the role of an intrapreneur. I based this assertion on first-hand experience with managers that I had either worked for or worked with. The more successful managers seemed to best function by focusing on the removal of organizational roadblocks and the empowerment of team members to build and deliver the idea. This involves driving the team and the organization more than driving the idea.

One of the VPs that read the initial manuscript disagreed. He felt that it was possible to drive the idea into a product by building an organization around it and constantly monitoring and guiding all teams that bring the product into the hands of a customer. He felt an intrapreneur not only has the technical focus but the business/organizational focus as well.

I ultimately modified the book and re-clarified the idea by specifically referring to line managers (those that manage a smaller team) and the role they play guiding these teams to be productive.

Should these types of managers roll up their sleeves and stay deep in the trenches with the technical implementation of an idea into a product?

August 13, 2009

Anyone who considers themselves an intrapreneur should have a couple of skunkworks going on. It's a win-win situation.

I'm not talking about organizational skunkworks (in which an entire division is dedicated to a secret project). I'm talking about personal, individual, and intrapreneurial skunkworks.

I keep a long list of new ideas in front of me at all times. I write down things that I think would be really cool to work on. They usually have nothing to do with the quarterly goals that I have, which are also in front of me at all times. My quarterly goals have to do with delivering on my business unit's core product.

Every once in a while I'll have a few spare minutes and pluck an idea out of the "new" column and promote it to the level of "skunkworks". I'll send out a few emails to people and see if they want to collaborate on the idea. My management chain may or may not be in the loop.

Why is this a win-win?

A Personal Win

I have about four skunkworks going on right now. All of them involve reaching out to someone in a new group that I don't know. That's a personal benefit for me. All of the ideas have been promoted from the "that-would-be-cool-to-do" list. This makes me look forward to coming in to work. That's another personal benefit. And finally, when the skunkworks gets unveiled, there is the potential for recognition and reward based on creativite initiative.

Now, there's always the possibility that someone in my management chain may ask "why did you waste your time on that?", or "shouldn't you have been working on your quarterly goals instead?". The potential for this situation is greatly minimized by practicing the core mantra of an intrapreneur: get your core goals done early and with the highest quality. No manager can argue with that (and if they do, it might be time to find a more innovative company or manager).

A Corporate Win

From a corporate standpoint, the more intrapreneurs that are exceeding their goals and skunk-working, the better.

Steve Shapiro makes this point wonderfully in one of his blog posts from the Blogging Innovation website. In his article "Why Edison Was Wrong", he describes an interview with InnoCentive founder Alph Bingham. After reading the article I believe that Steve's point is consistent with my belief about skunkworks projects.

If a corporation assigns innovation responsibility to "ivory tower organizations", it's quite possible that researchers are making a series of "experimentation mistakes" that will eventually lead to a feasible product offering. Steve references a quote by Thomas Edison that is often used to justify this type of innovation:

"I have not failed 700 times. I have not failed once. I have succeeded
in proving that those 700 ways will not work. When I have eliminated
the ways that will not work, I will find the way that will work."

The problem with this approach is that it increases "time-to-market". Incremental mistakes take time to correct.

What if the researchers were actually distributed intrapreneurs working in parallel on skunkwork solutions to a common problem? Could it be that some of them would make mistakes, while some would get it right on the first try? If some of them are right on the first try, then the solutions could potentially be brought to market earlier.

There's very little a corporation can do to stop someone from firing up their own skunkworks. It would be easier, however, if it was an acknowledged part of the corporate culture.

For individuals, it's simple to get started. Start making your list. When you find an opportunity to collaborate on a skunkworks with someone you've never worked with before, take it.

Make sure you get your core work done, because as I have mentioned, it is the key behavior. There's one more important strategy to keep in mind. You'll need a contingency plan that you need to have in case your skunkworks is discovered early.

August 06, 2009

One of the better speakers on innovation, in my opinion, is Vijay Govindarajan. I saw him speak at the World Innovation Forum in May of 2009 and published my thoughts about his ideas.

A word that Vijay frequently uses when describing innovation is adjacency. Innovation by adjacency is without doubt the form of innovation that I have practiced the most throughout my career.

In a June 22nd interview sponsored by the MIT Sloan Management Review and the Wall St. Journal, Vijay defined adjacency in the following way:

“I distinguish between two types of innovation: adjacency innovation,
which is a little less risky because you are innovating in a business
area adjacent to your existing core business, and breakout innovation,
where you are going multiple steps outside of your core business."

Adjacency For Intrapreneurs

While Vijay discusses innovation adjacency from the business point of view, I've always thought about it from the "building software" point of view. In particular, how does an intrapreneur find adjacent software opportunities? What are the customer pain points that can be solved and the product opportunities that can be gained by adding a twist to the combination of two different technologies?

My first experience with this type of innovation occurred during the design of the CLARiiON RAID algorithms. I was writing software that would return customer information based on mathematical calculations; this information might not exist on the surface of any disk (e.g. the disk containing that data had completely failed). I was concerned about data integrity and I needed a solution to give me the confidence that my software was rock-solid.

A picture tells a thousand words. I was an expert in my own implementation of RAID. Customers had an expectation of quality, performance, and data integrity from their storage systems. The product needed an innovative solution to address the data integrity requirement. The solution was unknown and is symbolized with a question mark in the diagram.

Innovative Adjacency: Collaboration with Peer Experts

At the time I was working on this problem I was aware of a test engineering group down the hall from my cubicle. I was no expert in the qualification of systems; I decided to find the person who was. I sat across from an expert and described my problem. I answered questions about my design of the RAID algorithms. We began to do some "what if" whiteboarding. This back-and-forth exchange led to the creation of a brand new piece of software with the following mission:

Automatically inject faults at all critical RAID state transitions.

I had never imagined a piece of software that would shut off disk drives, corrupt disk data, kill power to a disk array, and flood rebuilding disk areas with over-writes. But that's what we built, and we called it the disk array qualifier (DAQ). This piece of software has been maintained and enhanced for nearly twenty years.

Pulling in a third, adjacent sphere is the essence of Venn diagram innovation (another form of innovation by adjacency). The intersecting areas of the three spheres can result in an innovative solution (in our case, the DAQ).

This brings me to the subject of being an intrapreneur, which I define as "an innovator that conceives and delivers an idea at a large corporation". Intrapreneurial behavior can thrive in a company that has a large intellectual property and product portfolio. As an EMC intrapreneur I have access to a huge number of adjacent spheres (and the experts that go with them!). For example, when an EMC intrapreneur from PowerPath collaborates with an EMC intrapreneur from RSA, the result is a PowerPath Encryption product.

There's one catch to this type of behavior and it's called "initiative". The second half of Vijay's post contains a statement which I also agree with:

"I would shift to spending more like 70% on the core business and
perhaps 25% on adjacency innovations—and maybe 5% on really breakout
innovation."

This quote highlights Vijay's philosophy of balanced business spending on innovation. I like to apply his thinking to the behavior of individual intrapreneurs and how they manage their time. Each intrapreneur must have the discipline to regularly search out adjacent technologies (while still getting their core job done!). This means dedicating time not only to learning about all of the products in the company portfolio, but also getting to know the experts as well. EMC's internal social media platform (EMC ONE) has made this type of collaboration much easier.

What happens if the manager of an intrapreneur mandates that 100% of work time be spent on advancing a core product? The key thought here is time management skills. Keep a laser-like focus on hitting goals related to your core responsibilities (getting them done early if at all possible) while simultaneously displaying initiative in the exploration of adjacent technologies.

One final point for intrapreneurs: don't focus solely on the adjacent technology, but focus as well on the customer and market need.

July 28, 2009

When I attended the World Innovation Forum in NYC last May, I listened as Paul Saffo of Stanford argued that the era of the "consumer economy" has ended, and a new economy is beginning that revolves around a new type of transaction: individuals contribute unique content to corporations and get services in return (think of a transaction whereby you or I contribute a search string to google). My raw notes on Paul's speech are here, and Stu wrote up some commentary here.

Certainly the widespread growth of blogs, Twitter, and Facebook are evidence that something along those lines is definitely happening.

Bloggers contribute content that is typically based on their area of passion. Most of the posts I write, for example, revolve around one or more of the following: the building of software for the information storage industry; the culture in which these products are built; corporate innovation and the process of driving ideas into a product; and new technologies and directions that I'd like to work on next.

Over the previous 12 months I have noticed that several bloggers in the storage industry, as well as co-workers of mine within EMC, have decided to take their area of passion and create content in book form. Tony Pearson of IBM wrote a "blook" and talked about it here. Blogger Tony Asaro has mentioned that he is currently writing a book about being a consultant. Blogger Dave Hitz released a book earlier this year. Dan Schawbel is a co-worker of mine that made the jump from blogger to author. Other co-workers of mine have been experimenting with e-book technology.

Last year I made up my mind to do the same. At the time I had been reading some very interesting and stimulating blog posts about innovation. I decided to test out the process of organizing my thoughts on innovation and putting them into book form.

I found the process of publishing a book to be fairly straightforward. It's not as easy as setting up a blog, but the concept is similar. In this post I'll be writing about my experiences with self-publishing (otherwise known as POD or print-on-demand).

If you're considering doing the same, here's my advice.

1. Consider Formatting Issues Before Writing

As a blogger, the writing was the easy part. I came up with about 16 chapters and wrote them in 16 different Word docs. It was similar to writing extended blogs (except that each chapter contained much more detail and content). However, when it came to issues like margins, fonts, page headers, or blank pages, I lacked experience. By the time I got to the end game (working with my publisher to turn a Microsoft Word document into a printable book) I spent ALL my time tweaking those items. I wished that I had made those decisions back at the beginning. Who can help with those sort of issues? An editor.

2. Hire an editor

This is the advice that StorageZilla gave me and it was advice that I followed. However, my work with an editor mainly revolved around content and grammar. My editor did provide some extra services for me: changed the font from Arial to Times New Roman, and added some section headers. But I didn't consider margins (which vary based on the final "size" of the book), I didn't consider the impact of inserting diagrams and how that intersects with the margins, and I didn't understand the strategy of when to leave some pages blank and when not to.

My foremost goal in hiring an editor was to ensure that the book was grammatically sound; an equally important goal would have been to ask more questions about formatting early on.

Finally, an editor WIDENS the number of print-on-demand vendors that you might quality for. Some vendors don't care about the inside of your book; some of them most definitely do.

3. Choosing a Print-On-Demand Company

I did quite a bit of googling to research my options for turning my manuscript into book form. By far the most common name I ran into was Lulu.com (in fact, this is the company that TonyP used).

My editor, however, recommended another option: Booklocker.com. Booklocker.com actually reads the manuscript. And then they reject 90% of what comes in. From what I can see there were two important aspects that helped my manuscript gain acceptance from Booklocker.com: (1) my manuscript was grammatically sound, and (2) I already have an internet presence (this blog, Twitter, FriendFeed, etc). For bloggers, item #2 is typically not an issue, which is why I recommend Booklocker.com for those of us that want to turn blogs into books.

What's more, Booklocker.com has a great contract: give them a small fee, they'll start selling your book, and you can terminate the contract whenever you want. The author always retains full rights to the book.

4. Front and Back Cover Artwork

After my manuscript was accepted by Booklocker.com and we went back and forth on the formatting issues, I was presented the option of either (a) submitting my own cover artwork, or (b) hiring their contractor to come up with a cover that matched the theme of my book (high-tech innovation).

Submitting artwork is tricky (for me) because the width of the book affects the width of the "spine" part of the cover. When you add in the fact that I had trouble drawing stick figures in elementary school, the contracting decision was a no-brainer for me. Booklocker.com's contractor was very accommodating, and I was pleased with the end result (I've attached it to the end of this post).

5. Listing it on the Internet

The last thing Booklocker.com needed from me was the description and author information. They created a dedicated page that describes the book and allows it to be purchased. They also take care of getting it out to the other major sites like Amazon and Barnes & Noble, and provide instructions on how to update the book descriptions on those sites as well.

That's it. That's all it takes. What's it like to get that first printed copy of the book? Pretty cool. Booklocker.com sends you the first copy (before listing it) in order to give it a final look-over.

I'd be interested to hear from other bloggers who have done the same, or perhaps used a different service. Drop me a line if any of you have questions about the path I went down.

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Disclaimer

The opinions expressed here are my personal opinions. Content published here is not read or approved in advance by DELL Technologies and does not necessarily reflect the views and opinions of DELL Technologies nor does it constitute any official communication of DELL Technologies.